Various embodiments of this disclosure relate to workload management and, more particularly, to effective transaction distribution absent traditional communication between a load balancer and a group weight manager.
In a conventional load-balancing system, a group weight manager (GWM) communicates with a load balancer to facilitate reasonable assignments of transactions to various available servers. The GWM provides historical, real-time insights into the servers processing the transactions from the load balancer. The GWM generates weights using those insights, where the weights apply to the servers. The weights are the bases for recommendations to the load balancer for the distribution of incoming transactions to those servers. Examples of GWMs include the IBM® Unified Resource Manager (URM) and Enterprise Workload Manager (EWLM).
For intelligent load balancing to be successful, the load balancer must implement a protocol that accepts weight recommendations from the GWM. Server/Application State Protocol (SASP) is such a protocol. Whether SASP is adopted into a particular load balancer depends on market traction and the budget available to the load balancer's vendor to develop and maintain SASP support. Many load balancers do not support the SASP protocol today, making it difficult to use these load balancers with hardware from other vendors. Thus, there are drawbacks to supporting SASP, as well as drawbacks for not supporting it.